We all know horror writers, or read their writings…and, of course, we assume they live normal lives, or as normal as they get… But, what if their lives really are…horrible? Or worse?
She never came off the way a decent woman should, Cassie worried, waiting for the reporter to arrive. No one ever thought her sweet, or cheerful, despite a lifetime spent tying herself in knots trying to be those things — first for her miserable mother and rage-filled father, then, later, for Derek and their kids. The most she could say for her dark nature was that she’d made the best use of it she could, becoming a horror writer. A famously grisly one too, for a woman, people said – though Cassie liked to recall that a woman, Mary Shelley, was the mother of all horror. Those who came after were just Mary’s little Frankensteins, mucking around in the ink.
Cassie’s own brood was gathered near her now, the whole Lane household seated together in the living room, camera ready. Arlo, the little one, was nestled beside Cassie in the big chair, while her eldest, Zane, was trying to hide his jitters, on edge as always after a dry day. That was the deal she’d struck with Zane: go ahead, drop out of college, bag groceries and live off the family teat, but show up sober when people are looking. Cassie’s husband, Derek, seemed only slightly more at ease. He’d never been comfortable playing the admiring spouse; still, he went along, knowing he benefited, too, from his wife’s success. How else to pay for his ski vacations and taste for good wine — among his other, more private, pleasures?
The reporter, a slender woman in heels and tasteful make-up, joined the family with an “aw” for Arlo that made Cassie instantly regret having him propped up on her lap, there to telegraph her maternal qualities. It never felt good using the kids this way, and she disliked when these reporters inevitably turned to them, after running through all the stock questions for her.
“What’s it like having a famous horror writer for a mom?” the woman asked, almost flirty, addressing Zane first.
“Well, no one got bedtime stories like me.” Zane was an old hat at this.
Even little Arlo knew the right thing to say. “She’s just like a regular mom.”
They’d all performed quite expertly that afternoon. Even Derek managed to offer up a touching courtship story, about the time he realized he wanted Cassie as his wife.
“After months of my asking, Cassie finally let me read her writings. Back then, she was still unpublished and writing for herself. She was so worried I’d be scared off by her dark side, but I remember thinking: for once, a woman I’ll never get bored with. She’s the one.”
Maybe it was true, Cassie thought. Derek never got bored with her. Hate wasn’t boring.
Did he hate her? Cassie wondered, looking at Derek’s familiar, handsome, face. Or was this only the old voice inside her, telling her that she was hateful?
Cassie had always felt this way about herself, from the moment of her violent birth. Her mom had been a dancer, but had never danced again after Cassie broke her pelvic bone during the delivery. She’d never known how to be small enough, Cassie thought – and worried whether Derek had come to think so, too. Ever since he’d married her, as a skinny, strange, insecure girl, she’d just kept writing more, selling more, getting more and more notice, expanding ever outward and breaking those around her.
Crack. That was the sound she imagined when Derek smiled at her, when he mustered the appearance of love. He was smiling now as he reached for her hand, and his touch conjured feelings of how they used to be, really used to be, even when no one was watching.
“Just one final question.” The reporter swiveled to face Cassie squarely, her lotioned skin shining in the window light. “How do you manage this nice family life while writing such…savage things?”
“It’s easy, really,” said Cassie, like the sort of kind, simple woman who could find it to be easy. “I keep my home life happy, and the horror on the page.”
Soon after this, the photographer snapped photos, and everyone shook hands. As Cassie watched the reporter wave from the doorway and disappear, the words she wished she could have told her came pounding at her brain, making her head hurt: Would you dare ask a man how he managed to be both a father and a writer? What kind of sexist question is that?
Only, she didn’t say these things. Instead, she did what she’d trained herself from birth to do: stay twisted up into the appearance of a polite and cheerful sort of person. She thanked her family for cooperating, and then she locked herself inside her office and burned a woman alive with acid. On the page, of course. The reporter became the face of the character, not because she deserved to die, but because she was the type of woman who made Cassie feel she must pretend, and after all that pretending, Cassie had to find the real her again.
She was the acid.
Two hours later, when Cassie emerged from her office, the house was quiet. She found Zane, trying to conceal that he was already high, and he let her know that Derek had taken Arlo to a friend’s house on the other end of town. Derek had found a little boy, apparently, who lived close to her – the still nameless other woman — and suddenly, for the first time in their marriage, he, not Cassie, was the one scheduling play dates.
It hurt her deeply, though Cassie tried not to let it, knowing Derek was with a new lover. For months, she’d played a game of not knowing – for the children, she told herself, though really she went along because she believed she’d made Derek unhappy and this was her due. Maybe one day, he’d feel guilty, feel she’s suffered enough, and love her again.
Derek had really loved her once, and had chased her for a whole year while she made up her mind between him and another man. In the end, she’d chosen Derek because he seemed best to accept her, didn’t balk at her rough past – her father’s abuse, her mother’s suicide. Derek had defended her against anyone who would hurt her, or who wondered what such an attractive, affable guy was doing with an odd creature like her. She was the catch between them, he insisted: she was vivid, brilliant, interesting.
At the time, Derek’s greatest fear seemed to be that he lacked depths. What a beautiful fear to have, Cassie had thought then. She’d have gladly let go of hers, and for a while, it seemed as if she had. Derek’s lightness lightened her. He laughed at her mad ideas, and was so easy to scandalize and so innocent about it all that he’d helped her to find the innocence in her. Once they were married, he encouraged her to make a go at writing professionally, and she began with children’s books, as if to celebrate the child they planned to welcome soon.
Cassie’s first published work was a collection of magic tales, stories of transformations and escapes. She read them to Zane when he was little, when they were all at their happiest, before Derek’s business went bankrupt and Cassie’s negligible advances could no longer be contribution enough. Not long after, she ventured to show her agent those grimmer private writings that, until then, only Derek had seen. It was Erica who suggested Cassie’s talent was for horror, and that she try her hand at that – thought not even Erica could have expected what would happen, that Cassie’s first novel would become an instant best seller.
Cassie wrote two more horror novels in the next five years, each one selling even better than the last. After that, she and Derek bought the house, then Arlo was born, and Cassie did her best to balance raising two children with the demands of becoming a popular author. Derek worried some about the influence of her unsavory subjects – there were days she’d emerge from her office looking like she’d witnessed an actual murder – but Zane seemed to enjoy his mother’s interest in the morbid. He was at the age when kids are drawn to being frightened, and he’d adored the spooky bedtime stories she made up.
It was all seemingly fine until Zane began playing with the chicken or fish entrails he found in the kitchen and, later, mysteriously, like a character in her first novel, the dead animals he searched for on the road. Once Zane’s grotesque interests started scaring other kids at school, then came the meetings with the school psychologist, who’d taken special interest in what Cassie did for a living. “Children are like sponges,” she once said, and Cassie couldn’t help wondering: and am I the stain?
After that, Derek suggested she branch out into romances, or coming of age stories, “anything that has to do with normal people not dismembering each other.” It had been a reasonable ask, if only her talent hadn’t been for the macabre, and their mortgage so high, and Derek’s new job so less well-paid than his last. After a few fumbling false starts with a domestic novel, she gave up, reminding Derek that horror paid their bills.
Maybe it was this fact that fueled Derek’s resentment, but over time, as Arlo started having nightmares, and Zane started using – alcohol, then pot, then heroin –Derek seized on Cassie’s writing as the cause. He insisted Cassie keep her writing life fully hidden from the family. She was to avoid fans who approached, and restrict all evidence of her career to her office. Whenever Derek came upon notes and sketches she sometimes scribbled at night, left fallen by the bedside, he would grow angry. All of it must be locked away, he reminded her and, to emphasize the point, he installed a lock on Cassie’s office door.
Then, one morning, Cassie awoke and Arlo was gone. Before Cassie and Derek could even head out to look for him, they had a call from the neighbors a few doors down, who’d found Arlo munching cocoa puffs in the jungle gym in their backyard. They ran over to get him and Cassie picked Arlo up from the front steps where he waited with the neighbor. She hugged him to her chest. Arlo didn’t hug her back.
“Why’d you run, baby?” She asked him, but Arlo was quiet. Then his dad addressed him, knowingly, like a pal.
“The door to mommy’s office was unlocked, wasn’t it? You read something there, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Arlo said, and Cassie cringed to hear it.
Later, on the walk back, Derek whispered in Cassie’s ear. “You need to write outside in the house.”
“But you’re at your office all day,” she pointed out. “Working at home lets me be there for the kids.”
“Maybe it’s better if you aren’t.”
“You don’t really mean that?” she asked him, stung. “You want me away from them? Away from you?”
He’d looked at her with such tender disappointment, she felt that she would cry. “It’s gone too far, Cass. I can’t blame you for your demons, but I won’t let them haunt our home.”
“For God’s sake, it’s just writing,” she pleaded with him. “It’s just words on a page!”
Soon after, once they’d arrived at the house, Cassie went into Arlo’s room as he struggled to nap. Crawling into bed with him, she tried not to mind how he shifted his body forward to escape her touch.
“I’m sorry what you read scared you, but it’s just make-believe, Sweetheart. Can you think I’d ever hurt you? Have I ever in real life?”
“Not in real life,” Arlo admitted.
“But that’s all that matters. My writing is like when you play soldier, you never actually kill anyone. I play with characters like you play with toys, knowing imagination is a safe place and no one can really suffer.”
Was that what started it, she later wondered? Had those words, meant to reassure her frightened son, unleashed the horror to come?
*
It was the day after the reporter’s visit that a detective showed up at Cassie’s door. He was a big burly man, around fifty, smelling of cigarettes – a proper local, as people like her, who bought big houses here, tended to think of them. Detective Cahill was how he introduced himself.
“Could I speak with you, Ms. Lane?”
From the way the detective approached her, almost like he was intruding, Cassie sensed the news wasn’t about anyone close. Still, she hurried to ask him.
“No, no, sorry to worry you,” he said. “I’m guessing it isn’t anyone you know, though looks like whoever did this thing might know you – or know of you at any rate.”
They sat at the dining table and Cahill explained what had happened. As he spoke, Cassie noticed stubble on his face, and a nervous shifting of his leg. Whatever had gone on, it wasn’t the kind of business he was used to.
“We’ve had a murder last night, pretty gruesome, and see, one of the officers at the scene, when he got there, said it all seemed familiar to him somehow. Then he went home and checked in one of your books and it looks like this murder, it all happened like you wrote.”
A wave of guilt and dread overtook her. This was a fear Cassie had kept buried deeply – that her words could inspire a true act of violence. The notion was so awful that she, who worked with language all day long, couldn’t find the words to speak. Instead, she went with the detective to her office, where her books were all lined up on a shelf.
He pulled out her third novel, opening it up to the last chapter. Cassie’s eyes scanned the lines she’d half-forgotten, but as the story took shape again in her mind, she set the book down, recalling how that chapter ended: the killer came to the home of the woman who’d been insulting and rejecting him since back in chapter one, and he split her in half with a saw. Then he filled her insides with honey. The deranged reason he gave himself: to make her like a woman should be — sweet.
“You found a woman like this?” She stammered, feeling sick.
The detective nodded, and, with his own look of revulsion, opened an envelope with pictures. “In case you notice something.”
Cassie could only glance for a moment at that neatly sliced corpse before she tasted the bile in her throat.
“We’re thinking some sick fan, most likely,” the detective said, putting the photos away. “I came to ask if you’ve had any suspicious letters or contacts.”
“No,” she croaked, and, eager to get away, started heading from the office.
The detective followed her out. “Well, if you do hear something, or anything odd happens, you let me know. Seeing as this woman was killed pretty near, there’s a good chance the killer is hoping you notice. They might pop up somehow, wanting recognition.”
Her heart was pounding as the detective left her house, the way it would when she would wake up, as a girl, startled from a nightmare. Only then, Cassie could wake to safety and tell herself that whatever had scared her was just her own thoughts. Now, for the first time, she couldn’t say that. Some madman had made her thoughts real.
The next day, after an awful sleepless night, she drove into New York to see her agent. Erica was someone whose confidence and judgment had steadied Cassie across twenty years and, in her presence, Cassie felt calmer, despite the awful facts they were there to discuss.
On the table lay a small stack of letters and printed emails, culled from the hundreds Cassie received each year – all of which would be handed over to police. Seeing the selection Erica had saved, Cassie assumed these must be from convicts or lunatics, but in fact, they were something else entirely: a letter from a woman saying how Cassie’s books had gotten her through her surgical recovery, another woman saying Cassie had inspired her to write, a man who claimed he’d been saved from suicide by finding, in Cassie, someone whose mind resembled his own.
“I wanted you to see these,” Erica told her, with a hug, sensing her distress, “because I don’t want one lone crazy to drown out all these other people.”
Cassie mumbled a thank you, but that wasn’t enough for Erica.
“Don’t you dare stop writing,” she said, with a warm firmness. “And not because you’re paying for my daughter’s private school,” she laughed, managing to get Cassie to smile a little. “You have people who love you and who rely on what you do.”
“I guess it all depends,” Cassie replied, feeling confused.
“Depends on what? What some psycho killer does? He’ll kill anyway. So what then – what Derek says?”
“Derek hasn’t said to stop.” She was ashamed to say he hadn’t because she hadn’t yet told him what had happened. She still wished to believe he might never need to know, that the one killing might be all.
Two days later, the detective appeared again at Cassie’s door. As before, the two of them entered her office, this time to examine the first pages from her most recent novel, Twisted. Now that there were two murders modeled on her writing it was even more important, said the detective, that Cassie to come to the scene of the crime, to offer any insight that she could.
She didn’t want to go. The very word ‘scene’ terrified her, as if the line between art and life were already so blurred, as if the distinctions that had kept her sane were coming undone around her. She was afraid she’d lose her mind if she had to see it – an actual man twisted up like the abusive father in her novel, wrenched into a knot left to hang from the rafters where his insane children came to bat at him with sticks.
They drove on together in the detective’s car. The drive was a lovely one, the area quiet and peaceful – hers was the sort of regal Massachusetts’ town Cassie had always dreamed she’d live in. She wondered if what was happening was a kind of comeuppance. She’d taken her mother’s dreams from her; she’d had no right to have so much.
Over at the crime scene, a mere half-mile north, she’d only glanced at the gnarled, dangling corpse for a moment before she turned around and ran, sobbing, and the detective had to bring her home. There, once she’d calmed down, he had more information for her: in the process of searching through her fan mail, they’d found a letter, anonymously written, which contained vivid details of her life – descriptions of her house, her children.
“My children,” she said, aghast. She couldn’t bear the thought that she’d exposed them to danger. “You think someone’s stalking me? Possibly the killer?”
“We’re looking into it,” the detective promised. “Now that it’s a serial, the FBI will come in too. I’m sure we’ll find whoever it is soon.”
Cahill meant to offer reassurance, but as soon as Cassie was left alone there in that house, she couldn’t quell her fear until she’d looked up a firearms dealer about an hour out of town. Later that same day, quite unbelievably, she was in possession of a handgun. Hurriedly, she hid it in the sideboard before Derek came home. She could only imagine what he’d say – and if Zane should stumble upon that thing while high? Or Arlo, while playing? How much violence was she content to bring into their home?
Lying in bed beside Derek that night, Cassie considered disposing of the gun, but the truth was she felt relieved to have it with her the next morning, after Derek left, when the reporters began to gather on her lawn and she had the thought that this brutal stranger was among them. She could feel his presence near.
That was when the panic hit her. Her heart raced; her throat was closing, and so she did the same thing she’d done since she was eight when she felt herself on the edge of collapse: she got herself a scrap of paper and she wrote. Once she was well enough to walk and think again, she moved inside her office and locked the door.
After an hour safe inside a world she could control, she almost felt alright – until Derek, home early, yanked her back into reality.
“How the hell could you keep this from me?”
Of course, he was bound to learn about the killings – for all she knew, there were still reporters outside – but it seemed Derek had heard of it through a friend who’d seen the local news that morning. Derek, of course, never watched: just murder and crime, he’d said, and Cassie knew well his views on the audience for such things.
“I didn’t want the family worried,” she explained.
“Shouldn’t I get to decide that? To know if you’ve put us at risk?”
With these words Derek glanced at the desk and her computer, and took in what she was doing. “Are you writing? Now?”
“It calms me down when I’m shaken.”
“Are you kidding me?” Derek let out an amazed, disturbed laugh. “Could you seriously…with what’s happening out there?”
She could feel her desperation overtaking her. How could Derek take this as her fault? “It’s not my writing doing this. It’s some person, some vile human! And don’t think I’m not sick over it!”
“Are you? If you feel so awful, how can you go on creating these tortures, knowing that they’re happening to actual people!”
It was then that Cassie noticed Arlo looking in from the door. The yelling must have drawn him in – Derek had left the door wide open and she’d been too rattled to think to close it. She stared back at her boy, his little face full of terror. Then she ran to scoop him up and something awful happened: he ran from her in fear.
None of this was her fault, other people said so – Erica, her publisher, a few friends who called. Some madman was responsible, they said, and he’d be caught and it would end. And yet, these events had awakened a long-forgotten childhood dread in Cassie, this cold, awful conviction that, when bad things happened, she was the one to blame. Like when her mother once called her a black hole, and Cassie had imagined hurting her, only to see her mom burn herself badly fixing dinner. Then later, when Cassie’s father bruised her wrist and she sat seething in her room, picturing all kinds of revenge, her father tripped on the stairs and broke his arm.
Once Cassie was older, she told herself that these events were mere coincidence, that imagination couldn’t cause actual hurt. Now here she was, forty years later, thinking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, of her creation turned killer.
What sort of monster had Cassie now unleashed?
When Cassie glimpsed the detective at her door for the third time, she’d hoped for good news. She’d never in her life expected news to be good, but hope was what normal people did, and she was trying.
“There’s been another one,” said the detective, but this time he didn’t ask to come in or have a look at Cassie’s bookshelf because, as he informed her, “This murder wasn’t based on any of your scenes.”
She felt a brief instant of relief: maybe the killer had lost interest in her, found inspiration elsewhere. Still, a murder had occurred and the detective had come all this way for something.
When she and the detective arrived at the house, it was crawling with people – FBI agents, local police and forensics too. Cassie peered through the car window at the pretty, cared-for home, with flowers out front and a decorated porch — all of those details that women more domestic than her spent their time perfecting. The kind of home she knew, no matter how much she earned, she never could provide.
The detective gave her a mask to wear and urged her to breathe through her mouth. She chose to hold her breath instead.
The body was lying on the ground not far from the entrance, most of it burned a pinkish color, meaty in a way that made her gag. She knew how it had happened – the source of those marks – just like she knew she’d find the killer’s name branded across the poor woman’s chest. What she hadn’t thought she’d see was her own bloodied name.
She tumbled outside again, gasping. The odd way the detective looked at her, she wondered if she might be a suspect now.
“What does it mean? Who is she?”
“You don’t know?” His tone was stiffer than it had been at the start, but there was something else in it too, something she only understood later, as pity. She half expected Cahill to arrest her then, or at least bring her in for questioning, but, instead, he drove her home. As far as he knew, after all, that killing was no imitation of anything she’d written, nothing some crazy reader had gotten their hands on, and she was too frightened to tell him the truth.
The burns on that woman were acid burns. Cassie knew because she’d described the same marks in her office after meeting the reporter. She’d tortured a woman just like the one found dead now in a passage that no one else on this earth but her, she’d believed, had ever seen.
“We need to leave here,” she told Derek, when he arrived back at the house. She’d called him home from work early, wanting to sort out their next move before the boys were home. There was no way to say any of this gently so she told him there had been another murder and that she feared they weren’t safe.
“Why not just hire security, at least to start. It’ll just upset the kids to uproot us all – think about Arlo.”
“I’m thinking about all of you!”
“Look,” Derek replied, thankfully holding onto reason and refraining from blame. “If this killer admires you, why assume he’ll come after us?”
“Because,” she began and paused, dreading to admit it. “Whoever it is, I’m afraid he’s been inside our house.” Cassie looked up at Derek, guilty. “The way the last murder was done – it’s from my new novel, the pages I’ve just written.”
They both stood there, silent, while the house around them, all those rooms that had felt private and secure – despite the tumult that sometimes went on inside them – became a site of invasion. They were together in this, Cassie felt, in their love for a home that bound them still.
“What’s in that novel?” Derek asked, and Cassie felt herself go cold.
“That’s not the issue…”
Derek sensed her apprehension and didn’t wait there to hear more. He brushed past her to her office.
“It’s just sketches. Don’t read it. Derek, please!”
Cassie tried to stop him, but he pushed inside and locked the door. For several minutes, she stood knocking and crying, then she gave up and sank to the floor. It was like the worst corners of her mind were being turned inside out for all to see. There was no use trying to hide anything now.
“You murdered me,” Derek said, emerging from the room, pale and shaken. “You broke every bone in my body.”
“It wasn’t you,” Cassie protested. “It was a man cheating on the wife who supports him. What makes you imagine you bear any resemblance?” She almost smiled then, out of nerves, out of the awfulness of it all, but Derek wasn’t playing anymore, not even their polite game of not knowing.
“You actually planned to put that into the world? For our kids to read one day?”
“Is that what you think the problem is? Not carrying on an affair in front of them? My writing about it?”
“I’ve kept it quiet, for everyone’s sake. Out of respect.”
“Respect, is that what you call it? You’ve broken my heart!” She was surprised by her emotion then, in the context of all that was happening, but there was some relief in it, frankly, in escaping into normal problems, the typical anguishes of domestic life. “If you’re going to hurt me, then at least I get to write about it! I get to imagine breaking every bone in your body, just so I don’t do it in real life!”
“Well, now someone might!” Derek cried. Cassie saw the terror in his face, and it startled her out of her own anger.
“Of course, I wrote all that before–”
“You were writing just the other day.” He was looking at her, horrified, eyes wide. “Were you writing my death? Were you writing what they found? Was it a man with his bones broken?”
“No. His mistress.”
It took a moment for the meaning of this to hit her and Derek too, and then he darted away to grab his phone, nearly dropping it in his shaking hands. Cassie stood there, recalling how the detective had looked at her earlier – that mix of suspicion and pity – and her mind raced to think what he might have discovered: Derek’s number in the woman’s phone? His letters on her table?
When Derek had no answer, he hung up and called the police instead. That was when he learned, for certain, that the woman was her, the actual her whose name Cassie had never wanted to know. She’d only learned that name, Stephanie Yorke, later on the news, which Derek watched in a trance. He was facing something impossible: the death of a woman he’d cared for, maybe even loved, and the fact that the wife standing near him, the mother of his children, had, in some unfathomable, impossible way, killed her. She had killed her, Cassie believed, and this time didn’t soften the thought or make some reasonable but useless excuse. She had written this poor woman dead.
They left the house the next day, Derek making up a story for the kids about how mom had gotten an award and they were all being put up for the week. Arlo was still young enough to believe such things, and Zane, if he’d sensed what was happening through the drugs, preferred to dive deeper into his private fog. The house they’d managed to find on such short notice was a beach house in Oak Bluffs, deserted in the off-season, a pretty little house with steps right down to the sand. Cassie felt calmer there at first, engaging in the fantasy that she could leave the pain and violence behind. Even though Derek could no longer look her in the face, and chose to sleep downstairs on the couch, she let herself pretend she could make it up to him.
She vowed she’d stop writing from then on, and kept busy other ways: she took Arlo to an old maritime museum and invited Zane to lunch where she proposed a new therapist, mustering hope despite the many treatments she’d paid for that never worked. For three days, she almost maintained faith in a better future, one purged of all horror, until she arrived home to find Derek shouting for her to come upstairs.
He was worked up when she saw him, pacing the wood floor.
“You said you’d stopped writing.”
“I have stopped. Derek, I have.”
Derek leaned down and pulled aside the skirt around her bed to reveal at least a dozen pages stuffed on the floor below. Shocked, she reached under to grab a page and quickly dropped it again. Just a glimpse was enough to tell her she’d described another killing.
“I didn’t mean to do it. I must have written in my sleep.”
“Jesus Christ, Zane’s not the only addict in this house.”
“Maybe we can do something,” she offered, desperate. “Throw out the pens and paper. Tie my hands.”
“You’re not serious,” said Derek.
“You’re the one who thinks my words are killing people.”
“Don’t make it out like I’m crazy. This is crazy!”
Cassie could see how lost he was, how he didn’t know if his rage at her was fair. And yet, that night, when she presented him with the twine she’d found in one of the hall closets, he bound her hands as if she were a criminal.
Afterwards, lying alone, she tried to sleep, despite her persistent fear that the killer might come in to murder her family, one by one, while she stood by, tied up and helpless.
She woke the next morning to Derek’s scream.
Bolting from her room and down the stairs, fast as she could with her arms bound, she found him bent to the ground. She imagined him doubled over, crushed in two. But when Derek stood up, he was still whole, clasping something in his fist. It was a bone.
“Thank god you’re ok!” She offered up her tied hands for him to set her free, but Derek just backed away, swinging the bone like a weapon.
“Did you do this, leave this here to scare me?”
“Of course not. It’s just a dog bone. The owner of the house must’ve had a dog.”
“It wasn’t there earlier.” Derek kept moving away from her, swinging the greyish thing in her face. “There’s a break in it! Is that some kind of warning?”
“Derek, please. I didn’t do anything. Don’t overreact.”
“Overreact? I haven’t even begun to react! Stephanie is dead!”
Cassie watched him, in silence, as he fell back onto the sofa and began to cry. He seemed softer to her then, grieving, full of love. If only some portion of that love had been for her.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t want that.”
But it didn’t matter what she said then. Ever since he’d learned that she’d written his and his lover’s death, she’d stopped being someone he could trust.
“Your book sales,” he said, accusing. “You’re aware they’ve quadrupled since these murders happened. I looked it up.”
“It hadn’t occurred to me,” Cassie replied, truly. Then, as the meaning of his remark settled in, she added, hurt, “You don’t think that I could want this?”
“You’ve already sacrificed your family for your success.”
He didn’t mean it, Cassie told herself. He was just frightened and in mourning, looking for someone to blame. “I’d never sacrifice anyone, let alone my family. Derek, you know that. You know me.”
“Which you? The you that’s in those pages? The you that only knows how to kill and destroy? That you is a monster!”
“I’m not a monster! I’m your wife! I love you,” she offered, crying now, and again put out her hands for him to free her. Instead, Derek left her there and went racing up the stairs. A moment later, he came down again with Arlo in his arms, yanking Zane along after.
“Where are you taking them?” she called out. “You can’t just run off with our kids!”
“It’s for their safety.”
“Derek, no! Don’t you dare!”
That stopped him for a moment, the fear of what she’d do. He gazed at her as if persuaded of some unknown and terrible power in her.
Cautiously, she took a step forward, but Derek just yanked the kids outside, and the door slammed in her face. Through the window, bound and shaking, she watched her family vanish down the road.
A young officer came later that day to escort Cassie home and stay with her that night – to protect her, he claimed, though Cassie believed Derek had enlisted him to watch her instead. She imagined Derek’s secret hope was that the officer would find something to incriminate her and she’d soon be dragged off in handcuffs. But it wasn’t her that the police were interested in — it was Zane.
That night, Derek called her to tell her they’d brought Zane in for questioning.
“My god, why him? Why not me?” she asked, wishing it had been the other way.
“Seems you were with your agent for one of the murders,” Derek explained, though his own suspicions seemed to linger. “Whereas Zane has no alibi and a drug problem. Plus he had access to your writing.”
So it all came back to that again, she thought – her office, her words, her sick, infectious mind.
“He’s not a killer,” Cassie insisted, needing to believe this, though she knew no one would trust her word, not even Derek. He must hate her more than ever now, she thought. He must believe his greatest failure was not to take the kids and run from her a long, long time ago.
*
It was a horrible thing to wish for a murder. Cassie knew that, as she knew that what she was doing, now, meant crossing over to someone, or some thing, she had always feared becoming. Still, if saving Zane meant losing the last shreds of her decent, human self, she was ready to do it. She supposed she might be crazy by then, perhaps crazy all along, but whatever this power her own husband attributed to her – to think horror into being – she now accepted it as true. And so, that night at home, she envisioned her scene precisely, dredged up the most deserving of victims — a cruel old man she’d read of in the paper, a child molester recently released — and then she gave him a rather quick death, one from her fifth novel: the killer would impale him through the heart on a school yard fence.
When, while Zane was still in custody, police found a body just like that, Cassie collapsed at the news. She’d proved her son was not the killer, and now she hoped police would allow him to come home. But she’d also proven her oldest and greatest fear was true: she really was the cursed creature that, deep down, she’d always believed she was.
Later that day, police called to say they’d tracked down Zane’s alibi for one of the killings – his dealer – and Derek went to pick up Zane from the station. Cassie, meanwhile, crept into her office. There, inside this place that had once felt like her safe heaven, and felt haunted now by sorrow, she sat down at her desk to write the story of her death.
She spent time on the piece, which would be her last work of fiction. Despite its dismal purpose, she chose each word with care. Writing was the thing that had made her feel her most alive, had guided her through her worst pain, and she meant to do it honorably to the end. When she was done with the story, she wrote one last item, a letter telling her boys how much she’d loved them, and how her greatest regret was not having freed them of her sooner.
Then she waited. Hours passed in the dark quiet before she heard it.
Crack.
The noise came from the stairs, just she’d written it. At the next crack she would see it at her door: whatever it was – this something that hated her and wanted to end her almost as much as she wished to end herself.
Crack.
The body stood loping at the doorway, large, bloated and grotesque. The face was hard to make out in the darkened room: matted hair in its eyes, red wincing mouth, puffy cheeks bloodied all over like a baby in its first sheath of gore. Then it opened that toothless mouth and the words flew out, a chorus of voices, deafeningly loud: “Crazy, heartless bitch! Evil cunt!”
Cassie could smell the words, their foulness, and feel the blast of them as she stood there, paralyzed with fear, waiting for the creature to grip her and smother her.
“Murderer! Murderer! Child killer! Man killer! Mother killer!”
As it shouted on, the voice started to change, taking on the tone of actual voices Cassie had known:
“Black hole.” Her mother’s voice.
Derek’s voice, from not long ago: “Monster!”
Then the creature grabbed her and started to crush her in its arms while the words kept on spewing from its mouth: “Sick, selfish, hateful, crippled, villainous, poisonous, twisted!” Cruel as the language was, it echoed with a strange and intimate familiarity. Cassie recognized it, then, as the inaudible noise of her own mind.
She could feel the first bone crack, her rib, sinking into lungs emptied of air. It was happening, what she’d wished for: the creature would squeeze her and squeeze her until there was nothing of her left. Her death, she believed, would erase them both.
The next crack was her right arm. After that, her left arm. She was losing consciousness when she heard a choked sob, which could not have come from her own crushed throat, but which sounded like the smothered wail of a child. She could feel the thing pausing, enduring its own suffering, and then a warmth washed over Cassie and the strangest impulse overtook her. With the last strength in her broken arms, she reached out to hold onto the thing that was crushing her, to embrace it even as the cracks continued and she felt nothing more.
She’d been unconscious for ten days, the doctors told her, recovering from a collapsed lung. Two of her ribs were broken, as was one leg and both her arms, so that her first thought, upon waking, was the relief of knowing that she could not write. Derek and the boys came to visit her and she’d learned, to her dismay, that Zane had been the one to discover her lying half-dead in the yard. They were anxious, all of them – Derek, the doctors, the police – to hear how she’d acquired her injuries and what she recalled of that night.
Simpler, she’d felt, to claim she had no memory than to explain something they wouldn’t believe, and that she wasn’t sure she could find words to describe. What had it been? A fever dream? Derek’s own suspicion was she’d jumped from the window in a moment of madness. As often happened with Derek, she wasn’t sure if he didn’t know her at all, or knew her better than she knew herself.
Whatever had happened, she’d survived, and her children had been spared losing a mother. She clung to them guiltily, and took consolation, after all the misery and death, in knowing that she’d soon be released from the hospital and could return with them back home.
It was Zane who came to collect her later that week, as Derek claimed he was too busy preparing the house. After all, she could hardly stand, let alone climb the stairs to her old bed. A nurse wheeled her to the car and, before Cassie could get in, the woman took hold of her hand.
“I just want to thank you, Ms. Lane,” the woman said, shyly. “I know your books and I’m a fan. During your time here, I felt like I was getting something special.”
“Something special?” Cassie asked her, hoping all that the woman meant was the chance to have her in her care.
“Well, you were talking,” said the nurse. “No one told you what you did?”
“What did I do?” The fear in her was mounting.
“Told stories. In your sleep. The kind you tell.”
Cassie could feel her whole body tighten. “What did I say?” She asked, clutching at the nurse’s arm.
“Oh, some pretty creepy stuff,” the nurse said sheepishly, her eyes gleaming.
Cassie told Zane to speed home and he carried her in through the entrance where she could see it looming ahead: that strange being which she couldn’t explain except to say that it had sprung from her, her brainchild, her own Frankenstein. It was holding Derek up into the air and he was screaming. Arlo was screaming too.
With what strength she had, Cassie hobbled to the sideboard where she’d hidden the gun and held it up, facing the thing. She saw Derek’s gasping, horrified face pleading her to act. And then she heard that sobbing noise, as she had the night of her own near death – the wailing cry that let her feel this thing was her child, born to be detested even more than she had been. The warmth flooded her again and she called to it.
“Let me take you home,” she said, offering her hand, and, with that, Derek was released, and fell onto the floor. She didn’t watch him, only this gory child, as it turned its mournful face to hers. How could a fever dream appear so real? So rapt was she by what she saw, that she didn’t notice, until Zane shouted for his dad to stop, what Derek had done.
She could hear the sobbing, from all her children, natural and devilish, as she looked up to see the gun in Derek’s hand, aimed, not at the creature, but at her.
END
